Mixing now & then with Linda Lavin

Joe Meyers

Published 7:51 pm, Thursday, April 10, 2014

Photo: Contributed Photo, Contributed Photo

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Linda Lavin will talk about her stage, screen and TV career as part of the "American Legends" series on Sunday, April 13 at 3 p.m. at the Edgerton Center on the Sacred Heart University campus in Fairfield.

Linda Lavin will talk about her stage, screen and TV career as part of the "American Legends" series on Sunday, April 13 at 3 p.m. at the Edgerton Center on the Sacred Heart University campus in Fairfield.

Photo: Contributed Photo, Contributed Photo

Mixing now & then with Linda Lavin

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Linda Lavin has been too busy the past few years to spend much time looking back.

A Tony nominee in 2012 for her sensational performance in Nicky Silver's black comedy "The Lyons," the actress is in the middle of rehearsals for the same writer's follow-up play, "Too Much Sun."

The decade that Lavin calls a "renaissance" has included another Tony-nominated performance in "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife," along with critically acclaimed work in two off-Broadway hits, Paul Rudnick's "The New Century" and Jon Robin Baitz's "Other Desert Cities."

Returning to her musical comedy roots in 2011, Lavin appeared in the hit Kennedy Center revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" in Washington, D.C., where her rendition of "Broadway Baby" stopped the show every night.

Lavin's good fortune reached a peak that year when she had to decline moving on to Broadway with the Baitz play or the Sondheim musical in order to star in the off-Broadway debut of "The Lyons" (which was so well received that it transferred to Broadway six months later).

"This increase in opportunities has been surprising and gratifying and so exciting for me," Lavin said during a phone interview from New York City last week.

Lavin will be looking back at a career that has included Broadway plays and musicals spanning 50 years, the hit television series "Alice" and many popular cabaret shows.

"I come from people who were nostalgic, who liked to reflect on what came before -- storytellers. I love doing that, too, and, of course, I like being the center of attention," she said, with a chuckle.

The format in Fairfield is a mix of then and now that Lavin has been working on with her artist husband, Steve Bakunas, for the past few years.

While she talks about her career and answers questions, he will be doing a painting of Lavin in action.

"It's a lot of fun, and we've built it into an evening. Maybe it will become a Broadway show -- in a small house -- or an HBO special. Who knows? I love being in the moment while I'm living in the past," she said.

Lavin's second wind as a stage actress coincided with her move 17 years ago to Wilmington, N.C. She went there -- reluctantly -- to film a TV movie and then fell in love with the area. The actress met Bakunas in Wilmington, and they worked together restoring houses and creating a small theater. Bakunas is a drummer as well as an artist and plays with Lavin's band in her club appearances. (He's also on her 2011 debut CD "Possibilities.")

"It was a new place and a new life. Within five years, I met my husband and started getting calls for film and theater and just kept going back and forth to New York," she said.

The notion of combining a stage interview with a work of art being created on the spot began at a college benefit Lavin and Bakunas did in North Carolina.

"They asked me to do something personal, so we put up an easel and did an interview," she said, adding that it has also been gratifying to raise money for nonprofit groups by raffling off the art work after the show.

"It's fun for me to talk about myself, and it's a visual treat to see a painting come together right before your eyes."

Lavin's career has been full of surprising twists and turns. She started in musicals in the 1960s simply because there were open auditions for singers.

"I had to do that because I couldn't get acting jobs without an agent. I could sing, so I could go into clubs where I worked with Joan Rivers and Dick Cavett," she said of the jobs that led to her breakthrough performance in the 1966 Harold Prince musical, "It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman!" (The show that gave Lavin her signature tune, "Possibilities.")

Lavin then worked her way back into non-musicals, earning her first Tony nomination for Neil Simon's "The Last of the Red Hot Lovers" in 1970.

The hit TV series "Alice" -- which ran nine seasons from 1976-85 -- only came about because "the bottom dropped out of New York in the 1970s and we all had to look westward for work. ... It took quite a while to get a foothold (in TV) because I couldn't get arrested for that kind of work in New York. Looking back, you realize that one thing does lead to another."